Black Angels Read online

  “No, I saw it from the road up there just now when I said we should go this way. I know where Burwells’ is. I been there once. Us went to help Missus dress at a big party and spend the night. All I see tonight is smoke. He just too little to see over them trees and bushes, and he don’t know where he is nohow. So we stuck with him. He ain’t got nowhere to go and maybe his mammy dead too.”

  Luke shook his head and put his arms across his forehead. He was worn out. Still, he couldn’t get to sleep right away. He thought this must have been the longest day in his life. Being in the woods with this strange girl and this little White boy. All kind of pictures in his head. Daylily say her granny died, say she belong to Massa Riverson. Something about a woman who was killed in the woods with her two babies by some Yankee soldiers, and she left alone, and then they find this White chile sleeping under a tree who was hollering about finding his Mamadear and his daddy killing Yankees and maybe killing them too.

  And only God knew where this White boy’s Mamadear was at. Yankee soldiers could-a killed her too. It was a whole lot to think on, a terrible lot to think on. Then there was Aunt Eugenia. She would be worried sick by now, wondering where he was, and he out in this woods, which was far as he got looking for Unc Steph. He wanted to find the Union soldiers.

  Maybe Daylily was wrong and them soldiers who killed that woman and her babies wasn’t Yankee. Girls didn’t know nothing. He knew he could fight, even if he was just a boy. Somebody needed to fight. Folks losing they families and all. He knew about that.

  Luke felt his eyes tearing up under his arm. He didn’t want to cry, but nobody could see him in the dark. He sniffed up the tears and remembered that Unc Steph said when things get too bad, go to sleep. Always look better in the morning time. Maybe that’s why the good Lord made sleep.

  Morning came, but it came noisy and frightening. It came with sounds of guns and battle in their ears. They heard it almost all at once.

  “Lord-a mercy what is it?” Daylily gasped, sitting straight up, her eyes wide open as they could get.

  “Guns,” said Luke. “Hush, they’s mighty near.”

  Caswell almost got through the door before Daylily grabbed the seat of his pants.

  “Don’t you know nothin, boy? You get yourself killed!” she said.

  In the midst of the noise, Caswell yelled something about runnin off and killin Yankees and findin his daddy, and they pulled him down and held him still.

  “Now you look-a here,” Luke said fiercely. “You run out there and you gets killed. They’ll shoot you cause you so little they won’t see you and then they come lookin and they finds us. And another thing . . .” Daylily shot Luke a look and shook her head.

  “Just be quiet,” he told the boy, understanding her. “We got to stay here and pray to the Lord they don’t find us.”

  Caswell glared at Luke but sat still. The noise went on all day, it seemed. Screams of victory and agony all mixed together. It was happening over in the next gully, but it was so loud they sometimes had to hold their ears. All they could see from the doorway was a cloud of smoke, and then the whole thing stopped, it seemed, as suddenly as it had started. There was the uneasy quiet that comes after a fury has been let loose.

  In the deep silence, the three of them didn’t speak.

  Finally, Daylily sighed. “What us gon do? Us can’t sit here forever.”

  Still they waited, all of them afraid to move. The shock of the noise, the fear and the silence had them hypnotized.

  “Us got to eat sometime today. You reckon it safe to move?” she whispered.

  Luke said nothing. He was concentrating on what he knew he had to do. Guns meant fighting and danger, and he sure wished he didn’t have to go out there.

  “I seen blackberries over there, Luke,” she said, trying again.

  “Can’t get no berries till I check,” Luke said. “Watch him. I got to see can we move from here.”

  He was scared. Anybody’d be scared to go out there. And what if somebody grabbed him? The younger ones looked at Luke as if he should know what to do. Daylily held on to Caswell’s hand, and he didn’t even struggle this time.

  Luke ran his hand over his face. If only Unc Steph was with him now. He sighed twice and pulled on his pants as if to jack them up. “Don’t y’all move,” he said. “I’ll be right back,” and he stepped out into the afternoon sunlight quietly.

  Luke moved straight ahead, looking from side to side as he padded up a small hill. The afternoon sun shone on every blade of grass. Goldenrod blew softly in the breeze.

  But what he saw on the other side of the hill made him close his eyes and clap his hands over them. He just stood there in the grass, a young boy growing old second by second. He saw it all at once. It was like a dream, and he knew he’d never forget it. Before him was a field, a harvest of death, a sea of arms and legs, cotton and wool and metal, dead horses, and everywhere black and red stains spreading their fingers, spreading over what once were heads, hands, and private parts.

  Luke fell back as if pushed by a force he couldn’t see. When he came to himself, he was retching on what little was in his stomach, his nut-brown face a gray cast. He sat very still. So this was what he had left home for. This was war. Unc Steph and the others, they could be out there. What did God mean, letting such things happen? He had run away from the master for this?

  He slammed his fist into the ground, and it was only his hand that felt it, not the hard-packed dirt, or even the butterfly that had found its way to a pink clover blossom next to him and fluttered off. Luke slammed his fist again and again, until he had made a dent in the earth. Tears covered his chin, and he choked on them. Then he remembered the others.

  I can’t let them see me crying like an old woman, he thought. If he didn’t get back, they would be coming to find him before long. He couldn’t let them see this, a girl, and a little White boy who was already spooked about his mama. They needed water too, he remembered, feeling his throat tighten.

  He looked straight ahead into the field and suddenly began to get angry. He didn’t like that this could happen and people could be there one day and gone the next. He thought about Aunt Eugenia and the others he cared about. They wouldn’t want him to give up. If nobody but Daylily and Caswell knew he was alive, then they would have to be his friends. He was the oldest, he thought, swallowing hard, and he would just have to be the one who saved them. Luke stared at the mass of bodies. He remembered his mojo only when he grabbed his shirt to wipe his face and felt it.

  His nostrils went rigid with determination. He inched his way toward the hellhole in front of him, closer and closer to the bodies of soldiers, some not much older than him. He was looking for three coats, and canteens and some more gunpowder and pellets. He would have to touch them, pull off their coats and look in their pockets, look into their eyes.

  He avoided bodies that had no arms and legs, turning his head, reaching out timidly and then snatching back his hands. The dead were already beginning to stink. He wanted to do it without looking at them, but there was no way to miss them, no place to walk without seeing.

  Only one jacket came off easily. He would always remember the ragged limbs, the feel of the stiff bloodstains on the coat. The soldier’s arms were pulled back, and his coat was unbuttoned. Luke cut the strap holding the powder sack and the canteen with his own knife. With one done, he felt a kind of triumph over this awful work. He could do what he was doing and not die himself. After that their faces became just a blur of flesh.

  Finally, he had taken more than he could carry. Three coats, canteens, a pocket New Testament, gunpowder, hats, knives and even a few letters and coins, two pairs of shoes and most wonderful of all, a bayonet. He had to drop some things at the top of the hill and make two trips.

  There was no way to tell what color some of the uniforms had been or how many of each. A few of the men had worn farm shirts and overalls. If the rebs won, he reasoned, it’d be dangerous to stick around. If it was Union soldiers
who won, would they keep him or kill him?

  He knew some Black folks followed the soldiers for food. So much had shaken his confidence. The world had turned itself around on him, and he was no longer sure how anything would work. Better to keep on the run and be far away from this battleground before he trusted anybody.

  He found Daylily and Caswell asleep from exhaustion. They had given out from hunger and the fear of not knowing what had happened to him. The sun was low in the sky.

  Luke decided to surprise them with blackberries. He took the three Confederate hats he had found, and filled them with blackberries to present with his other gifts.

  When he got back to the shed, the others were still asleep. Luke tried to stay awake to make sure Caswell didn’t sneak off. Finally, he put his head down on his folded arms. Maybe he should just go on home. He thought about his mam again. Whenever he’d ask Aunt Eugenia why they killed his mam, she’d say because she was too much trouble.

  Aunt Eugenia would wipe her eyes quick on her apron and say something about onions making her eyes water, so he wouldn’t know she was crying, but he knew.

  She’d say, “She was just sick at heart was all. Your mama was just sick at heart,” and then she’d say, “Go long now, don’t ask me no more.”

  Maybe his mam could see him up in Heaven. He could feel himself getting sleepy and he was glad. He was tired of thinking of Aunt Eugenia, Unc Steph, the dead men blown apart, all of it, over and over. As he drifted off, pictures of his mam’s face floated through his mind. Her name was Lucymae. He missed her.

  When she woke up from her nap, Luke was sitting there chewing.

  “Ooh, what are you eating?” Daylily asked. “You got berries. I can see your mouth all blue round your lips. You got berries. Gimme some!”

  Luke shook his head. “Nope. They mine.”

  Daylily protested. “That ain’t fair!”

  By this time Caswell was awake. “I want some,” he whined. “I should have some too.”

  “You don’t even know what I got,” Luke said. He was hiding the berries under the coat he’d just found a few hours before. He uncovered the rest of the berries with a flourish. “There! I brought y’all a surprise! We got berries for supper!”

  Daylily looked at the berries in the hats. “Where you get these hats, Luke?”

  “Found em, on the ground. Eat them berries and say thank you.”

  She was already licking the juice off her lips.

  CHAPTER 7

  GOOD-BYE

  The berries were good, but by morning her stomach felt empty again. She hated to think of the sun coming up because she had to tell Caswell. Otherwise he’d be yelling about his Mamadear forever. They had spent another night in the shed, because Luke said they needed to wait until morning to start out again. Besides he heard voices of men over on that battlefield and he knew that they were probably soldiers burying the dead. They were all hungry, but looking for food meant going out there where there were dangerous men and dead bodies.

  Daylily was lying wrapped in her coat. A bad smell hit her nostrils as soon as she was fully awake. It was still dark. They were all sleeping warm for the first time in two nights. She took a sip of water from her canteen and Caswell sat up slowly. He looked terrible. His eyes were red rimmed. He had been crying for two days and had thrown up yesterday.

  “I got to go,” he said to Daylily. She glanced in Luke’s direction. He was sleeping hard. There was no sense waking Luke yet, but she knew Caswell was going to raise a ruckus. She put her finger across her lips, indicating he should be quiet, and took him outside the shack, checking first one direction and then the other.

  They seemed to be entirely alone. The sky was a soft gray, just before sunrise. Daylily looked quickly toward what she knew had been the Burwell place. Still, she took him behind a scrubby bush near the shed.

  “I got to tell you somethin,” she said softly as he unbuttoned his pants. In the two days they’d been on the road, he’d given up hiding himself from her, and watched her face as he peed. He always had trouble closing his pants back up. Daylily thought he couldn’t have been more than six or maybe seven. The boy was probably used to some mammy doing that for him. She finished the trouser buttons and put her hands around his waist and sat him down on the ground. “I got to tell you bout your mama.”

  “You don’t know nothin about my mama,” Caswell said. He picked at a bug bite of some kind. “You jus a nigger gal. How could you know something about my Mamadear? She’s a lady.”

  “I knows where the Burwell place was,” Daylily insisted, and she hurried on now, wanting to get it over with. “And it’s all gone. It’s burned down, Caswell. It’s gone.”

  He spit out his lower lip, which was beginning to tremble in spite of the scorn he tried to show. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I been there. I been there with my granny. It’s not a far piece from here. We was almost there day before yesterday when we saw this shed and I smelled the smoke. You can see the place from here. Used to be on a hill, and you can see it all gone. You was too sleepy last night for me to tell you.”

  He was up and running into the gloom of the early dawn before she had the words out. Suddenly, he disappeared in the tall grass. She darted after him; as he fell, she caught him by the pants. His elbow was bleeding a little.

  “Show me,” he wailed. “Show me. I don’t believe you!”

  Daylily knew that he would never be quiet until she did, so she stood him up, and together they walked to the fork in the road. They went close enough to see in the distance a strange blackened hole with great chimneys and what had been a grand entranceway that now led to nowhere. Early morning mist floated about in the ruins. It stank of smoke and fire. “That was it, Caswell. That was where you was headed.”

  He just stood there as if nailed to the ground. And then he clutched himself around the waist and began to rock back and forth. He rocked and wailed, “Nononono.” The only witnesses besides Daylily were satiny blackbirds who began to caw, and the mockingbird who answered Caswell with its beautiful morning song.

  Daylily held on to him. She gave him what nobody had given her, rocking him like a baby, but moaning for herself. Their cries rose over the field ruined with blood and ash, and up into the dawn pink with the sun’s fire.

  CHAPTER 8

  FISHING FOR DINNER

  Luke woke with a start and looked around for the others. They were not there. His heart began to beat faster. He was sweating and trembling some, and he had dreamed of being buried alive by soldiers who had no hands or faces. Today, there’d be more soldiers here; he knew that. It would take more than one day to bury all those men. He scrambled up, yearning for a biscuit, and then that awful death smell took his yearning away and he took a swallow of water from a canteen instead.

  They had to hurry. It was dangerous to stay here any longer. He knew the soldiers were out there.

  A few minutes later he found Caswell and Daylily outside sitting together in silence, their faces streaked with dirt and tears. Luke looked like a traveling junk man. He had put on one of the coats and brought along everything else, the bayonet and rifle under his right arm, two coats under his left, one pair of shoes on his feet and one under the coats. Three canteens were draped around his neck, clanking as he walked, and his pockets were full of gunpowder and pellets. There were three hats on his head, and his curly hair stuck out all around the caps. In the distance he could hear the sergeant giving orders to the burial detail.

  Daylily looked up at him as he approached. “I done tole him,” she said. “I done tole him his mama gone, and he done pitched a fit worse’n a mad dog.”

  “We ain’t got time now, we got to go,” Luke said, shifting all his burdens. “Here, put on these coats.”

  “What’s stinkin’ so bad? Smells like more dead folks,” said Daylily.

  “They be just over that hill burying dead folks,” Luke answered. “Here, you all. Put on these coats. We got to go.”

/>   Instead of taking the coat Daylily only stared at it.

  Luke looked at her with a steady gaze. His jaw was set. He didn’t flinch. For a minute he thought of telling Daylily that her coat had been on a dead man, and scaring her half to death with all the pictures that were in his head of blown-off hands and exploded stomachs and worse. But he couldn’t. He knew that two days ago he would have done it just to hear her holler, to see her throw her coat on the ground and run, and he knew she’d have said something like, “Boy, take this ugly thing away from here. It be cursed or something!”

  But something had happened that made him different. He didn’t know what it was, but he couldn’t bring himself to tease her that way. A part of him was gone, and some other part was there instead. Part of him wanted to understand why men would fight and die like pigs being slaughtered, and part of him wanted to prove that he wasn’t afraid of what he had seen any more. For the first time he really knew he had blood in his body that could spill out in the dirt, and nobody might not even see it, or even care, not the way he cared when they beat his Mam to death. How could people just kill you and leave you in the dirt to rot? He wanted to understand that.

  So he wasn’t the same. He couldn’t make fun of Daylily like he always did the girls back on the place, and he couldn’t tease Caswell about his Mamadear, who was most likely dead in the fire. He ought to say something about Daylily’s granny and Caswell’s Mamadear, but he didn’t know what the words would be, even if he tried, so all he said was “You right. Them’s dead men you smell.”

  Daylily opened her mouth, as if she had been told to take something that would make her sick.

  “We ain’t got time to talk now. We got to go,” Luke said, “fore they comes this way. We got to get back to the river road and get into the woods so’s they don’t find us.” His canteens banged together while he struggled with the coats, and the shoes fell into the dust. He dropped the three hats trying to hold on to his rifle.